Car!

Those of you who hang around here a lot probably know I drive a 1998 Toyota Corolla that I've had for, oh, about fifteen years.  Hey, it isn't that I get overly attached to a vehicle.  It's just that no matter what time it is, it's never the right time to get another car.  There's a medical emergency or I have to go on an unexpected trip or Christmas is coming or (in this case) all three at once. Which is why the way things fell together over the last few days just goes to show that sometimes the universe just wants something to happen. 

It all started when Kellum the Great, our massage therapist, was over doing his thing in our living room. (That sounds dirtier than it is, unfortunately.)  I mentioned I was looking for a car (and had been for months, in point of fact) and he said I should really check out Grapevine Motors.  He'd bought two cars from them, and Suzy had bought one, and each time it turned out to be a pretty good deal.  I told him I was a tough customer.  I wanted another Toyota Corolla, for one thing, and I wanted it to be somewhere between 2011 and 2014 with less than 80,000 miles on it.  Also, I didn't want to pay more than $10,000.  But I went ahead and logged onto their Web site, and darned if they didn't have a 2013 Corolla with 50,000 miles on it for sale for $10,990. 

Since I have USAA, though, I also logged on to USAA's car buying service.  This is about as painless as car shopping gets, folks, and if you even think you might be eligible for USAA's panoply of services, you really owe it to yourself to check them out.  All you need is a parent who served in the armed forces at one time or another, and they don't even have to have been an officer anymore.  The car buying service will literally find you the car you're looking for, negotiate a price for you, arrange your financing and tell you where to go pick it up.  That's all you have to do; go pick it up.  I mean, that is pretty hard to argue with.  So I got on to the car buying service and searched for Toyota Corollas of a certain age, and the same darn car from Grapevine Motors popped up.  The Web site even helpfully told me that Grapevine Motors was about 30 miles from my house, in case I was planning a trip out there.

So in no time flat I was planning a trip out there.  From my work I'm about halfway there, anyway.  I drove out there in horrible traffic, missed the turn twice, and eventually stumbled onto the place just a block or two from downtown Grapevine.  And there was the Corolla, sitting near the front and under the lights.  I looked at it for about thirty seconds before deciding to buy it. The main hurdle was getting Joan out there, to make sure she could get in and out of the car without too much trouble (she's having a lot of trouble with her knee and surgery is probably on the horizon at some point). 

So the next night I made another trip out there, with Joan.  She could get in and out of it just fine.  I drove the '98 Corolla for the last time, having gassed it up and washed it earlier in the day.  The proprietor of Grapevine Motors gave me $900 auction value, which I thought was exceedingly generous.  Then he told me how much the Corolla was going to cost, I agreed, we shook on it and that was that. 


Oh. Except for the title.

Yeah, I'd kind of forgotten that in transactions involving expensive things like cars, there are generally pieces of legal paper involved.  The proprietor of Grapevine Motors needed the title for the '98 Corolla and I haven't found it yet.  Half the time I'm lucky to know where my mortgage documents are, in case we ever have to evacuate before a flood or a tornado or some other oncoming disaster.  I think I'm going to have to go to the county tax office and have a duplicate created, which requires both Joan and I to be somewhere, dressed and scrubbed and with picture IDs, at seven in the morning.  But they can't sell my old Corolla at auction without it, so we gotta do it.  I'll let you know what happens.  I'm mildly concerned that if I take Joan out of the house before seven in the morning, she'll say, "Oh, great" and turn into a pile of dust. 

Anyway, title aside, I do have a very nice new car.  My odds of ending up on the side of the road in a pile of parts have dropped dramatically.  You can even tell what station the radio's tuned to.  And there's a (gasp!) CD player.  Best thing, though, is that it's another Corolla.  That means everything's right where it was in the old car.  I reach for the air conditioning and my hand goes right to it.  I need to turn on the defroster and there it is.  And get this:  I can turn the radio up and down using buttons on the steering wheel.  I mean, what kind of newfangled gadgets are the kids in Japan going to come up with next? 

Many many thanks to angel Kristen for helping to make it all happen.  As I believe I mentioned, it wasn't a good time to buy a car at all. 

So I'm 45 Years Old.

Yep, another birthday.  This is an important one, though, because it has a 5 in it.  Any birthday with a 5 in it is important.  The first 5 and you're ready to start kindergarten, thus ending the period of time known as childhood.  The second 5 and you're ready to date.  The third 5 has you out of college, probably working some menial job somewhere and wondering what in hell just happened.  By the time you get to the fourth 5, though, you've probably figured it out.  And then there's my 5.  Meaning, I only have 5 years left before every single year has a 5 in it for ten entire years.  Which, when you think about it, is pretty scary, because after that last 5 year, there's only 5 more years until you start collecting Social Security.  Unless you start early.

45 puts you smack in your Middle Forties.   By the time that 5 sneaks in there, you can't say that you're in your "early forties" anymore.  5 is halfway to 50, and I'm not going to be one of those creepy adults who tells you "It all went so fast I feel like I was seventeen just days ago."  What crap.  Plenty has happened since I was seventeen, and here's a news flash: A lot of time had gone by since then.  I was 17 in the Eighties, when everything was big and brash.  Fashions were big.  Hair was big.  Politicians were big (and they all wanted to be Ronald Reagan).  Pop music was big, AIDS wasn't yet a thing and everybody was doing cocaine.  Or at least, everybody who could afford it was doing cocaine.  Compared to what's going on now, it was practically an alien planet.  Who would walk down the street these days wearing stacked heels six inches high, shoulder pads that reach to her ears and hair that adds another foot to her height?  I mean, besides Sandra Bernhard?

Yeah.  A lot's happened.  And I'm on the other end of it, meaning I survived it.  Some of my friends didn't and are stuck somewhere between 1989 and now.  The thing that sucks about dying young is that you're forever mired in the context of whatever was going on when you checked out.  My friend Roberta, colloquially known as Burt, lives on in my head wearing the same black jeans and The Clash t-shirt she had on the last time I saw her.  Would she have gone on to embrace grunge, hip hop, Air Jordans and cargo pants?  Maybe, but we'll never know now, will we?

Anyway, I got to live to be this old.  And like the guy at the end of Saving Private Ryan, I'm sort of wondering if I've done anything that merits it.  I didn't cure cancer or bring peace to the Middle East.  I never sang with Lennon, or played in Jimi's band; I never met no president nor shook a Gandhi's hand.  (Oops.  Apologies to Stuart.)  Like everybody else on the planet, I was born with big dreams and fantastic visions.  Where did I end up?  Well, for the last fifteen years I've made lots of lawyers look good in court.  I wish some of them would have been arguing key human rights cases or at least fighting the big insurance companies, but most of them weren't.  Yay.  Go, me.

I need one of those It's a Wonderful Life experiences where I get to see what the world is like without me.  Maybe Noah would have formed a grunge band and ended up world famous in Estonia.  Maybe Kim would have moved to San Francisco, founded a tech company and changed the whole nature of right-clicking on things.  Maybe Joan would've led an armed band of church ladies into MGM Studios and forced Bruce Lansbury to start making Wild Wild West episodes again.  Immediately.  (No, not the godawful movie; the really cool TV show.) For that matter, maybe John O. Pastore would have never been elected to Congress, having his campaign undone when his affair with Madalyn Murray O'Hare came to light.  (And maybe Madalyn wouldn't have disappeared under mysterious circumstances, but then, who doesn't love a good mystery?)  And in case you have no earthly idea what I'm talking about or who these people are, well, that's what Wikipedia is for, kids.  As I was saying, a lot happened between then and now.  You can't exactly expect me to spell it all out.

Speaking of It's A Wonderful Life, though, I wonder what would have happened if George Bailey were to have gone back to Pottersville-that-could-have-been and discovered that most of his friends were doing just fine.  Mary Hatch married Sam Wainwright and had six brilliant children that invented things and cracked the stock market and created a new generation of jet airplanes.  Burt the cop and Ernie the cab driver formed a comedy duo in which they used puppets to argue with each other in an Odd Couple kind of way.  Mr. Potter found Transcendental Meditation through the Beatles and gave away his fortune to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who didn't want it but said what the hell and used it to develop a new line of Tarot cards. (Wikipedia, people.  Wikipedia.  Come on, it's just you and Google.  Who's gonna know, besides the forensics cops that will be tearing your computer apart after your wife disappears?)

And my little corner of the world?  Well, that's just what I'm wondering.  What if everything just kept rolling along, fine as paint, my absence marked by nothing more interesting than the lack of a bassoon player in a certain high school band?  I mean, bands can live without bassoon players, folks.  That's what the little tiny notes written above the second trombone part are for.

It's after midnight and I have a pool to be in around eight tomorrow, so we'll have to shut down speculation on this whole thing before I throw myself off a bridge into the Bedford River just to find out.  If nothing else, Chloe the Cat would not be happy if there wasn't a Jen-shaped human mattress to curl up uponst in the middle of the night.  And Joan might have something to say about it, too.  Anyway, I'm 45 years old.  That I've survived this long must mean something or other.  I wonder what.

Why One Billion Hindus Are Mistaken.

Original Title: Jen Rewrites Ten Thousand Years of Religious History.
More Original Title:  Fine, Screw Up The Planet If You Want.  It's Not Like You Won't Be Back.
About As Original A Title As You Can Possibly Get: Trust Me, I've Been a Dancing Dutchman, A Brave Cosmonaut, A Wily Nazi and a Crafty Trilobite.

Hang around a meditation hall long enough (I'm talking years, not hours), and strange things will start to happen to you.  For one thing, you'll become calmer and more peaceful.  No matter how hectic your day to day life may be, you'll relax more, laugh more, spend a little less time grinding the gears of your 2013 Spyder and a little more time watching the moon over White Rock Lake.  You'll become a nicer person.  You won't get as impatient when you're waiting in line, and you'll give people more of a break if they do something clueless, stupid, or (gasp) human.  What's more, you'll start to give yourself more of a break.  You might find yourself eating more nutritious food, getting more sleep, saying no to projects you're just not up to handling right now.  It's hard to be nice to other people without being nice to yourself first.

But those are just the surface benefits.  And believe me, they're awesome.  All by themselves, they're certainly worth having, even if it's all you ever get out of meditating.  For some people, it is.  For other people, though, spooky things start to happen, too.  You might notice that you're becoming more intuitive and less nervous.  You know what people are going to say before they say it.  Something happens to a family member who's miles away and you get a "something's wrong with Jack" feeling well before the news about Jack filters through the various phone lines and Web interfaces.  Some people have little glimmers of enlightenment, too--short bursts of How Things Really Are.

The Japanese words are satori or kensho, both of which mean something like understanding and neither of which are at all descriptive enough of understanding to convey anything like understanding.  What I'm talking about here is like a glimpse of the Grand Canyon after days spent in darkness.  It's blindingly intense, but it's not like you can really get a grasp on the color of the sky or the shape of the mountain or even the posture of all of the rocks.

Do I speak from experience, you ask.  Well, yes, actually.  About five years ago, while I was at work, I got up and walked over to the printer, and while I was on my way everything just kind of stopped.  Everything got sharper; colors were brighter, the air took on a crystalline quality and the people in the room -- there were people in the room -- sort of glowed a little.  I remember thinking, "Oh.  Is that all?" and then I started laughing because it was so ridiculous.  Not the glowing and the sharp colors and the crystalline quality of the air -- like really cold air at the top of a mountain on the first run of a really good day of skiing, I guess you could say -- but that I was staring at it all that time, and I'd never noticed it before.  I started laughing and it stopped happening.  Nobody stared at me; they were used to my occasional weirdness by then.  And it was a crummy job, anyway, but you get my point.

And some people start getting little glimpses of their past lives.  Like me and the Dutchman.

The thing about reincarnation is that we have it just ever so slightly wrong.  Not we, you and me we, but we, Buddhists.  Buddhism grew out of Hinduism so Hindus must have it wrong, also.  We've got this idea that we live this life, or these lives, and die and drift around for a while and then come back, personality essentially intact, in another body in the same world to do it all over again, each time learning more cool spiritual stuff until we achieve Nirvana, or become the Brahman, and don't have to do it anymore.

"I don't believe in reincarnation, and I didn't believe in it when I was a hamster." - Shane Ritchie

It's an attractive idea, but it's fundamentally flawed.  Why?  Because the whole idea of a separate, distinct personality is fundamentally flawed.  That thing we call "I" doesn't really exist.  It's a term of convenience, a thing we call ourselves because we think we're separate from our fellow beings when we're really not.

The Doctor: Imagine a great big soap bubble with one of those tiny bubbles on the outside. 
Rory Williams: Okay. 
The Doctor: Well, it's nothing like that.

See, the truth is that there's only one being.  One consciousness.  One life.  And it's all of us, all the beings that ever existed and that exist now and that ever will exist in the future, from the smallest single-celled organisms to the biggest blue whale, on this planet and every other planet where there's life in every galaxy in the universe and every universe there is besides this one.  In short, existence is, uh, really, really really BIG.

Chaplain:  O Lord... 

Congregation: O Lord... 
Chaplain: ...Ooh, You are so big... 
Congregation: ...ooh, You are so big... 
Chaplain: ...So absolutely huge. 
Congregation: ...So absolutely huge. 
Chaplain: Gosh, we're all really impressed down here, I can tell You. 
Congregation: Gosh, we're all really impressed down here, I can tell You. 

So what, then, are you seeing, if you have a glimpse of a "past life"?  I mean, if that's not "you" living in another body, at another time, then what is it exactly?

Well:

My theory is this.  We're already everybody all the time anyway.  So there's no reason why we couldn't remember bits and pieces of other lives, whether they're "ours" or not.  In fact, there's really no way to lay claim to "ours."  If it's all one collective consciousness, how do you section off pieces?  You can't.  It's like Odo and his people, the drop becoming the ocean and the ocean becoming a drop.  If you don't know who Odo is, ask somebody.

There are a lot of people who claim to have been, say, Napoleon in a past life.  Maybe they're all telling the truth. Maybe Napoleon made quite an impression on the collective mind, and so we're drawn to it more than we would be to, say, a crafty trilobite in the Permian period.  And there's no reason we can't visit people we're going to be in the future, as well as people we already are in other dimensions around this one.  (Yep, I believe in other realities.  In one of 'em I have a teenage son who plays football.  And looks disturbingly like my one boyfriend. In another one, I moved to Albuquerque when I was twelve and--never mind.)

I was somebody else in the present once, just for a second.  I was listening to my friend Brother ChiSing speak.  Well, actually I was watching his hands.  He has beautiful hands.  So I was watching his hands and suddenly I was inside him, watching his hands from the other side.  This lasted about a nanosecond and then I realized this was kind of rude of me, and the second I did I was back on the other other side, watching his hands.  He really does have beautiful hands.

So that's my theory, Jack.  I'm pretty sure I'm right.  But if I'm not, we can always go back to the boring old "be good, come back as rich guy, be bad, come back as cockroach" theory of reincarnation.  And with that, my friends, I wiggle my feelers, shake out my middle pair of legs and scuttle off into the night.  Cheers, all.

Post-Election Red Tape Blues

Don't get me wrong, Harry & David are two of my best friends, but does it bother anybody else when they email you a list with presents all picked out for everyone you know?  I mean, yeah, thanks for thinking for me and all that, but I'm quite capable of deciding for myself what to send to my great-aunt, Maude, thank you very much.  And my great-aunt Maude doesn't like Moose Munch.  I'm just sayin'.

Anyway:  I didn't go to work yesterday.  The Official Reason was that I had Female Issues, which was true, actually.  Sharp pointy cramps low down and across my back.  I hurt my back recently, as I may have mentioned, and my third adventure in chiropractic turned out about as well as my first two (which is to say, really badly), so I'm wondering if that had anything to do with it.  I don't normally have very serious Issues that direction, much less bad enough to call in dead.  (Which is, I think, a first for me at this job, or maybe a second.)  But the Real Reason was that at about 4:00 on Election Day, I ran out of cope. Just shut down.  When I woke up the following morning, the only thing I wanted to do was put my fuzzy robe on, snarf down about a fistful of Advil and go back to bed.

Eventually I let Joan talk me into this.  I called my Official Boss (TM) and he couldn't get me off the phone fast enough.  Ladies, if you have a male boss and you need a day off, just mention Female Issues.  Not only don't they want to know anymore, they have an oh-my-virgin-ears moment trying to get away from you, which is kind of comical.  Well, it would have been comical if I'd been in a better mood.  Then I called the office manager, talked to her answering machine, and nosedived into bed, there to stay until the manager called me back about nine-thirty.

She was nice.  I told her I was thinking of maybe calling my doctor and seeing if she'd call in something stronger than Advil, which I may have done and I may not have done; I don't actually recall.  When I'm out of cope I can't waste precious cope on trying to remember things that are going to be irrelevant in twenty-four hours anyway. She told me to take the day off after I made noises about trying to come in later. Which was fine with me.  I went back to sleep again and stayed there until my stomach started poking me about one in the afternoon.

I got up, prowled around the kitchen, found Something to Eat (I think it was a bowl of granola) and went back to bed.  This time I didn't wake up until Joan came home from a dentist appointment about four.  By then there were some signs of returning cope.  We made a pizza and ate it.  Some frozen yogurt was shared. We both went to bed early and this morning, when I woke up, my cope tank was filled back to normal.  And my cramps, while not gone, were once again responding to Advil.

Now, this is not  a scientific theory or anything, but I can't help but notice my being out of cope happened right around the time a lot of people that would normally know better were making fools of themselves in public in various ways.  A lot of them were pretty excited and a fair number of them were also angry.  Angry because things weren't going their way, because people that they had counted on to do one thing were doing another thing, that all those naysayers they were going to show up on this particular date were instead committing the ultimate crime of being right.  I wasn't there and I have not seen the video but I understand that Karl Rove even raised his voice. 

Now, I'm a rather sensitive type, and I tend to pick up other people's feelings whether I want to or not.  Hence my love of horror films, though they're not nearly as much fun unless I'm actually in a crowded theater, freaking out with everybody else.  I notice anger and tension way before anyone's willing to tell me what's going on.  I even pick up on people dying halfway around the world, and I've been known to do a pretty good job of locating recent dead bodies.  (Yes, folks, I'm the psychic equivalent of a corpse-sniffing dog.  Too bad I can't turn it on and off at will; I'd have my own reality show.)  So I'm thinking, if I'm in a country where half the electorate is angry, excited, disappointed, freaked out, thinking about moving to Canada or otherwise perturbed, I might very well run out of cope just trying to stay balanced.  A country's a big place, folks, and there are a lot of people crammed into it.

So that's my theory.  The United States of America made me sick.  That, and bad cramps.

Oh, and hey, we had an election, didn't we?  Did the black guy win again?

Talk Thursday: Ashes to Ashes

One of the interesting things about Talk Thursday is that I never have any idea what I'm going to do with the topic until I sit down with it. Take this week's topic, for example. Ashes to Ashes. Most people think of death, and since I'm most people, I do, too. But I think about one particular death because of this lyric:

Ashes to ashes, earth to earth

The preacher throws in the first handful of dirt

My little boy asks me, "Does goodbye always hurt?"

--The Raphaels, "Life is a Church"

The guy who wrote that, W. Stuart Adamson, Junior, decided to remove himself from the planet a little over nine years ago at the most importune time possible. I can't imagine he was really trying to cause chaos and disruption for me in particular when he drank himself to death in a cheap hotel room in Hawaii, but damned if he didn't succeed anyway. 2001 wasn't a very good year for anybody, of course, what with buildings falling in New York and an idiot in the White House and the first X-Files movie coming out. Still, for me it was kind of the train wreck that divides my life into before and after. First Joan's mom, who had congestive heart failure and had been sick for years, died. Then a guy in my church choir felt a little sick to his stomach one day, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died a week later. And then--this happened.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Stuart had disappeared about six weeks beforehand. He'd left a note for his teenage son that said something to the effect of "See you Sunday," and then dropped off the face of the earth. Apparently he was at a soccer game (football, if you're on the other side of the pond) with some friends some time later when he got a call on his cell phone. He made some excuse and left early, and that was the last anybody saw of him.

The weird thing is, he didn't really go anywhere. He checked into a hotel near Nashville, where he lived, and pretty much stayed right there, drinking and ordering in food, for most of the time everybody who knew him was going bananas trying to find him. The police were alerted. His credit cards were checked. Law enforcement bulletins were put out. His publicist even raised his voice. His fans, among them me, were emailing his photo around the still-fledgling Internet, the electronic version of knocking on doors and saying, "Have you seen this man?" Nothing. Nada. How he got to Hawaii was and is a complete mystery.

Anyway, he did get to Hawaii, and he did get even drunker than he already was and hang himself from a shower rod. His blood alcohol content was about three times the legal limit, which is basically fatal. And some 7,000 miles away, I was helping Joan clean her mom's apartment. I excused myself because I had to sing at my dead choir member's funeral and I needed to go home and take a shower first. I got as far as getting undressed when out of nowhere, this tidal wave of despair hit me. It was like all the light of the world got sucked into a void. I couldn't stand up under it. I put my shirt back on and lay down, not sure I'd ever get up again. And I stayed there, missing the funeral, as it got dark outside, until Joan came home and asked me if I was okay.

I was not okay.

But hell, what could I say? Hi, everything sucks and nothing will ever be all right again?

Here's the spooky thing. I didn't actually find out Stuart was dead until the following day, when it started getting splashed around the Internet and even made a few newspapers. "Eighties Singer Found Dead," that kind of thing. So here's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking I had a gen-you-ine psychic experience. I think I picked up on somebody else finding out Stuart was dead, and wham, it passed through that person's brain and into mine like a lightning bolt.

I'd love to know who.

Anyway. Ashes to ashes, earth to earth. I kept breathing, and life got better. What's more, I got medication, and it got better still. But I have no explanation for what happened that evening.